It really does not matter what type of business you have, these days the most likely contact you will have with your customers is via their smartphones. People already order more pizza through their phone; movie, theatre and concert tickets; read news feeds, digests and updates; order a taxi, post a picture, rent a room, save their place in a queue, pre-order their sandwich, and conduct a hundred different services and purchases generally within a typical day.

Here are the key headline criteria:

100 Glances per Day

As reported by Pew Research - the average person glances at their smartphone circa 100 times each day, it is the only device they have which is always typically within reach. If you want to reach out and connect with your customers more regularly, it has to be via and through their mobiles / smartphones.

60% of current news views

More-and-more news is currently being consumed on mobile - usually via a myriad of mobile apps, be it newspapers, news delivery services, or smart apps like the Yahoo News Digest or The Economist’s Espresso. News print is still dwindling, and every week / month still sees more casualties on the news stand. Whether you like it or not, in the future, the vast majority of news media will be accessed via mobile technologies.

Cookie Armageddon

Ghostery, Adblock Plus and soon Apple’s Safari 9.0 Browser will add to the already 200+ million users who nullify / disable 3rd party cookie-served ads, content and services - using ad blockers and privacy protectors. Many traditional ad-supported businesses are already down 20% on revenue year-on-year, and it’s only going to get worse.

Mobilegeddon

First Google, and then Bing started giving preference to mobile-optimised sites in search results. Since all of the traffic growth is on mobile, this is hardly surprising.

Ecommerce Growth

Ecommerce figures for desktop / laptop are static - i.e. showing little variation between years. As IMRG keeps telling us, all the Ecommerce growth is on mobile formats - if you have a shop or retail operation of any kind - you really need to make sure your mobile experience is a great one.

Page load speed

For mobile formats, page loading speeds are paramount. 3rd party cookie services significantly slow down page speeds and impact negatively on the general user experience, as well as incurring data costs for those consumers. Mobile sites will increasingly need to streamline their services, to ensure that fonts, scripts etc. are only being loaded once and through a single source. The current fragmented approach most companies subscribe to seriously compounds issues with page upload.

Seamless Customer Journeys

You hear about this every day - the ease of use and seamlessness for your customers transitioning between devices and being able to carry on with what they were doing immediately as they hit the next device. Netflix is a great example of this - where you start watching a program on your commute on mobile or tablet, and then switch to laptop or desktop when you get home, and possibly choose to watch the big final scene on your widescreen TV. In the same way responsive-design interfaces maintain the customers’ journeys across different devices allowing them to add to basket, and then alerting them of that when they switch devices - all the time keeping the interface / browsing environment totally familar and consistent.

Single Customer View

This is the holy grail for most business owners - the ability to view all your customers’ activities on a single screen - to track their spend and individual value / contributions to your business - whether through social activities / sharing / networking or just regular purchases.

Mobile First Approach

It used to be that digital customer interfaces were designed from the top down - in terms of Desktop as number one priority and then smaller screen format devices lower down in the pecking order. Nowadays with mobile formats growing to become the most significant means of customer contact, the optimal approach is to focus first on the mobile experience and then extrapolate from there.

Convergence

Following on from ’Single Customer View’ above, and dealing with ’Cookie Armageddon’ the only successful remedy is to converge your activities and run them all through a single system. We believe the Affino Unified Digital Business Platform is a very rare animal, in that it fulfils all the imperatives contained on this page. Where most digital solutions are increasingly fragmented, Affino offers you exceptional focus with relative ease of use.